Open source and the reinvention of legal education

Introduction Although it is easy and exciting to predict massive, sweeping change in legal education, such change may actually be in store. The accretion of criticisms – too much focus on the common law, misplaced trust in the Socratic method, failure to prepare graduates for practice – may have finally led to a moment of systemic reform. In fact, many of the nation’s top schools have already undertaken significant changes to the structure of their curriculum, their pedagogical methods, or the substance of their core courses. The changes may stop there; more likely they are heralds of more significant reforms to come. Now is the time to decide how we will approach the upcoming revolution. If past practice holds, individual schools will make changes based on their own faculty’s pedagogical preferences. These changes will be made internally, with perhaps a press release but little else to share with the rest of the academy. Moreover, in all but the most dramatic of reforms, the course content will be left to individual faculty members. Such has been the way since Christopher C. Langdell: Schools may develop curriculum, but professors manage their own course materials. And most professors will outsource this responsibility to casebook authors and the publishers that support them.